What Not to Wear - Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine

A nice explanation of what clothing looks good on different female body types. On the plus side, pictures of every outfit, pictures on women with fairly normal bodies, and an upbeat, "you can look good if you just learn a few things" attitude. On the minus side, only two models (the authors), though they have very different shapes and manage to cover a surprising number of good and bad examples. If you read the Amazon reviews, many people complain that the ideas in this book are too basic. And I would agree: if you are at all fashion-advanced, this is not the book for you. But for beginners (like me), it is a great place to start.

Once you’ve mastered these ideas, I suggest the Lucky Shopping Manual by Andrea Linett and Kim France, which discusses how to create outfits. It also gives explanation of the function of different items of clothing (e.g., demi-bras are for wearing under button-down shirts) and suggestions for building a wardrobe. I would avoid Secrets of Style by the Editors of InStyle. Not enough pictures, and those that they have are either line-drawings (too hard to interpret) or photographs of actresses (honestly, how useful are photographs of Charlize Theron and Halle Berry in learning how to dress your normal body with your normal amount of money and total lack of stylists?).

What Not to Wear
Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine
2003
Available from Amazon

Troublesome Young Men - Lynne Olson

Lynne Olson writes a fascinating account of British politics in the two years before Winston Churchill became prime minister of Great Britain. It focuses on the young Conservative politicians who worked to bring down the Chamberlain government, but along the way it discusses in detail the catastrophic, appalling, craven policies of appeasement, illuminating why even now politicians invoke “Munich” to encourage the march to war.

The book also provides glimpses of the class structure of Britain – boy, howdy, am I glad not to be a part of that. For instance, the Cavendish family, thought to possibly be richer than the royal family, owns a 30,000-acre estate and an ancestral home with 297 rooms – putting America’s largest house, the Biltmore Estate, to shame. The Cavendishes looked down on Harold Macmillan, who married into their family, because while his family was wealthy (they founded Macmilllan Publishers), they had made their money “in trade”, that is, by working for it. Even after Macmillan became prime minister, held that post for six years, and presided over great prosperity in Britain, the Cavendishes thought him beneath them.

Also, the book is full of interesting characters and incisive language. After Chamberlain came back from Munich where he had sold Czechoslovakia out to the Germans, he proclaimed, “Peace with honor.” The first lord of the admiralty, Duff Cooper, resigned in protest of the Munich agreement. He said later to friends that if Chamberlain had said “peace with terrible, unmitigated, unparalleled dishonor” perhaps he, Cooper, would have been able to stay on.


Troublesome Young Men: The Rebels Who Brought Churchill to Power and Helped Save England
Lynne Olson
2007
Available from Amazon

The beginning

This blog is for things I recommend. Mostly books, occasional films, essays, other things (like the OXO Smooth Edge Can Opener).